No Smell
The virus / I got off lightly / No smell / I can stick my head in a jar of coffee and detect nothing. I can bathe in Old Spice and whiff not a jot. I can pack my nostrils with festering fromage and be affected not. The zest of lemon, the core of onion, the holy trinity of finely chopped chilli, ginger and garlic, or the usually so pungent aroma of decomposing Margate seaweed that it will stop you dead in your tracks / nothing. Incense or bleach, freshly ripped mint or a freshly baked madeleine dipped in tea, wet pine forest or wet dog, dusty leather or fresh tobacco fingers, it’s all the same to me / profoundly neutral / Remembering such smells makes you remember that smell makes you remember. The memory of smell’s memory. Remembering things is not necessarily remembering things as they were / though / is it. And after they’re all dead, after it’s all broken, after it’s scattered and the landscape of horror is left bare, smell and memory will remain, hanging, poised for reclamation / up for grabs. What has become sharply apparent, searingly vivid / is the shallow absurdity of the unimportant. That too will be up for grabs when we attempt to roll back out the new normal. But it will stutter and jolt and falter / I hope.
